Detlef Weigel

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Weigel 2016

Detlef Weigel (born December 15, 1961 in Dannenberg ) is a German-American developmental biologist .

Life

Detlef Weigel grew up in Lüchow (Wendland) and studied biology and chemistry at the Universities of Bielefeld and Cologne from 1981 to 1985 . He wrote his diploma thesis on neurogenesis in Drosophila under José Campos-Ortega. He then moved to the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology , where he examined pattern formation in the Drosophila embryo with Herbert Jäckle . In his doctoral thesis , he described the first member of an important class of transcription factors, the forkhead proteins . In 1988 he submitted his dissertation to the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen .

During his postdoctoral stay with Elliot M. Meyerowitz at Caltech in Pasadena , he turned to plant molecular biology : he cloned and characterized the flower identity gene LEAFY from Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress). From 1993 to 2002 he was Assistant and Associate Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla . In 2002 he accepted a position as a scientific member and director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where he founded the Department of Molecular Biology. He is also an honorary professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and at the | University of Tübingen.

plant

In the 1990s, Weigel mainly studied flower development and control of the beginning of flowering. The work of his laboratory provided essential and often groundbreaking findings in both areas. In this way, he and his colleague Ove Nilsson succeeded in transferring the LEAFY gene from Arabidopsis thaliana to trembling aspen , which reduces the time it takes for this tree to bloom to a few months. Weigel and his colleagues also discovered the FT gene, the product of which is an important component of the mobile flowering signal; the journal Science counted this among the three most important findings of 2005. Novel genetic methods he developed led to the discovery of the first microRNA mutant in plants.

The preoccupation with factors that control the beginning of flowering aroused Weigel's interest in the evolution of adaptive traits, of which flowering is a prime example. In addition to work on genetic variation at the beginning of flowering and other environmentally-dependent development processes, the creation of new genomic resources, such as the first haplotype map in a non-human organism, is also of great importance. For this purpose, Weigel launched the 1001 Genomes Project for Arabidopsis thaliana . In addition, genetic barriers are being investigated as the latest topic, whereby Weigel discovered that these are often linked to autoimmunity in plants. In hybrid offspring, gene products of the two parents trigger an immune response in the absence of pathogens , which leads to hybrid necrosis, dwarfism and a general reduction in reproductive quality in these hybrids. Many of the causative genes code for components of the plant immune system, which indicates limitations in the combination of optimal resistance genes.

Prizes and awards

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ D. Weigel et al .: The homeotic gene fork head encodes a nuclear protein and is expressed in the terminal regions of the Drosophila embryo . In: Cell . Volume 57, 1989, pp. 645-658, PMID 2566386 .
  2. ↑ D. Weigel, Herbert Jäckle : The fork head domain, a novel DNA-binding motif of eucaryotic transcription factors? In: Cell. Vol. 63, 1990, pp. 455-456, PMID 2225060 .
  3. ↑ D. Weigel et al .: LEAFY controls floral meristem identity in Arabidopsis . In: Cell. Volume 69, 1992, pp. 843-859, PMID 1350515 .
  4. ↑ D. Weigel, Ove Nilsson: A developmental switch sufficient for flower initiation in diverse plants . In: Nature . Volume 377, 1995, pp. 495-500.
  5. ↑ Igor Kardailsky et al .: Activation tagging of the floral inducer FT . In: Science . Volume 286, 1999, pp. 1962-1965, PMID 10583961 .
  6. ^ Philipp A. Wigge et al .: Integration of spatial and temporal information during floral induction in Arabidopsis . In: Science. Volume 309, 2005, pp. 1056-1059, PMID 16099980 .
  7. ↑ Javier F. Palatnik et al .: Control of leaf morphogenesis by microRNAs . In: Nature. Volume 425, 2003, pp. 257-263, PMID 12931142 .
  8. ↑ Julin N. Maloof et al .: Natural variation of light sensitivity in Arabidopsis . In: Nature Genetics . Volume 29, 2001, pp. 441-446.
  9. ↑ Sureshkumar et al .: A genetic defect caused by a triplet repeat expansion in Arabidopsis thaliana. In: Science. Volume 323, 2009, pp. 1060-1063, PMID 19150812 .
  10. ↑ Richard M. Clark et al .: Common sequence polymorphisms shaping genetic diversity in Arabidopsis thaliana . In: Science . Volume 317, 2007, PMID 17641193 , pp. 338-342.
  11. ↑ Sung Kim et al .: Recombination and linkage disequilibrium in Arabidopsis thaliana . In: Nature Genetics. Volume 39 (2007), pp. 1151-1155, PMID 17676040 .
  12. ↑ 1001genomes.org
  13. ↑ Kirsten Bomblies et al .: Autoimmune response as a mechanism for a Dobzhansky-Muller-type incompatibility syndrome in plants . In: PLOS Biology . Volume 5, 2007, p. E236, PMID 17803357 .
  14. ↑ Eunyoung Chae et al .: Species-wide genetic incompatibility analysis identifies immune genes as hot spots of deleterious epistasis . In: Cell. Volume 159, 2014, pp. 1341-1351, PMID 25467443 .
  15. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Detlef Weigel (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on July 20, 2016.
  16. ↑ Detlef Weigel will receive the Barbara McClintock Prize 2019 . Max Planck Society, March 26, 2018. Retrieved July 4, 2018
personal data
SURNAME Weigel, Detlef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American developmental biologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 15, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Dannenberg